How to Start Valuing Your Time as a Business Owner

The one thing that every successful business owner and entrepreneur has in common is the almost fanatical respect that they have for their own time, going to incredible lengths to make sure that they don’t waste even a single second of any day.

Everyone is able to achieve incredible success – from your favorite entrepreneurs to your favorites athletes, actors, and general superstars in every field – share the same kind of belief, that time is our most valuable asset and the absolute last thing any of us could or should do is squander even a spare moment of our time.

Of course, not everyone has this belief already and a lot of people had to go through some pretty rough and rocky times to learn just how precious time really is. It’s the only thing that comes to us completely free of charge with no strings attached, but it’s also the only thing that we won’t ever be able to get more of.

Once the hourglass runs out of sand, that’s the end of the ride.

It’s of the utmost importance that you really start to embrace the real value of your time, but the only way that you are going to be able to make this kind of lifestyle shift is if you understand exactly how valuable your time really is.

Find out how much you are really worth

One of the most important things you can do is find out exactly how much you are really worth, and exactly how much even just a single moment of your time actually is.

Take a single workday – a regular, everyday work day – and figure out exactly how much actual work you spend during that block of time. Most people try and shoot for an “eight hour day”, but the reality of that is your likely to get about an hour or two of actual work in. According to one report, CEOs at Fortune 500 companies really only ever get about 36 minutes of actual work in for every eight hours they are at the office.

Once you have your actual working hours, divide your annual income by those hours alone and you’ll begin to understand just how valuable every moment of your time actually is.

How to safeguard your time from time thieves

Now that you understand just how valuable your time actually is, it’s time to start protecting it from anyone and anything that would attempt to steal it from you.

For starters, you need to abandon the “dollars for hours” mindset that most of the world is hooked on. Stop trading your time for money, and instead work on ways to make money even while you sleep. This is the real secret sauce behind successful business ownership and being an entrepreneur.

Secondly, you need to fall in love with the word “no”. You need to turn down more things that will eat away at your time so that you can instead focus on important parts of your life, valuable parts of your life, and things that add more value to your business and yourself.

Finally, you need to really start embracing systems and delegation. As a single individual you only ever have 24 hours in a day, but when you systemize your business and delegate or outsource a lot of the work, you’re able to exponentially grow your efforts, your output, and the amount of money that you are able to bring in.